Ceilon Aspensen

NOT a "true war story"

Revisado: 11-16-22

This book started out very well and Bryan Cranston did a great job reading it. I bought the book because of the title and description concerning the things carried by Vietnam soldiers, and the importance of those things to the soldiers themselves and their experience in-country

However, I quit listening after the second gratuitous animal torture session by Rat Kiley. After all of his focus on what makes a "true war story," I was disappointed and irritated that Tim O'Brien doesn't really know the difference himself. What Rat Kiley did to those animals had nothing to do with grief or the horrors of war, but rather everything to do with the obvious fact that he was clearly a psychopath. That is one of the symptoms psychologists look for when seeking to diagnose or dismiss the possibility that someone is a psychopath: cruelty to animals.

The stories about Rat Kiley's cruelty to animals did nothing to add to my understanding of what soldiers endured in Vietnam, nor their experience there. They merely shined a light on the demented mind of one individual. Perhaps the fact that his unit allowed him to do those things did illustrate the numbing effect that the might have war had on his fellow soldiers; but it had nothing to do with "the things they carried," unless you want to include carrying a puppy until Rat blew him up, or carrying a baby water buffalo until Rat slowly shot it to pieces without putting it out of its misery.

More than anything, it was a failure in the writing that caused me to abandon this book after the baby water buffalo mutilation. The animal cruelty stories juxtapositioned with O'Brien's pontification about what makes a "true war story" and how to tell whether you're reading one or not proved to me that this book was severely lacking cohesion, good editing, and a central thesis. As such, and not wanting to suffer through potentially gratuitous animal cruelty stories, I bailed.

My father was a Green Beret with the 5th Special Forces Unit in Vietnam in 1969. I'm not naive about the things suffered by soldiers in Vietnam. I've read a multitude of books about the Vietnam war experience in an attempt to better understand what my father was doing over there and what he went through. "Dispatches," by Michael Herr accomplished that for me. So did "We Were Soldiers Once," by Hal Moore, and "A Murder in Wartime," by Jeff Stein, among many others. My recommendation is that you skip this one and go on to one of those.

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The content is great but the narration is ANNOYING

Revisado: 01-06-22

The content in this book is fantastic. She provides a lot of useful details about starting an art commission business. However, the narrator sounds like the voice on the elevator at the Ministry of Magic in the Harry Potter movies. Very sing-songy and only useful if what you want is to be lulled into a hypnotic state or fall asleep. Good narrators tell us the STORY in a way that engages us. This narrator reads this book as if she were making a public service announcement...for the duration of the entire book!

I do not recommend narration by Nikki Delgado.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona

Relevant and Funny

Revisado: 10-06-17

After 400 years Cervantes' two books on Don Quixote area still relevant and funny. I laughed out loud numerous times.

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